The Best and the Brightest

by David Halberstam

  Bowles’s influence had diminished steadily during the campaign. Early during the race the question had arisen of whether he should seek re-election to his Connecticut congressional seat, and something of an Alphonse-Gaston charade took place. Kennedy asked Bowles to run. Bowles deferred, saying that if he was not going to serve out his full term it would not be fair to the good voters of Connecticut’s Second Congressional District, nor to his protégé William St. Onge, who wanted the seat. Then Kennedy argued that if Bowles dropped out of the race, the Stevenson supporters would think a deal had been made that Bowles was to be Secretary of State; hence they would not work as hard for the cause. Bowles then insisted that the Stevenson people were made of sterner stuff, and pushed very hard for Kennedy’s permission not to run. Implicit in all this, of course, was the idea that if Bowles did not run, the Administration was committed to giving him something very high, perhaps even State. Kennedy did not like to be crowded and he was uneasy with Bowles’s request, and he did not give his approval to the Bowles withdrawal. Bowles, who did not like the House of Representatives, dropped out of the race anyway. This irritated Kennedy, who felt Bowles had gone around him, and whatever chance Bowles had to be Secretary of State, which had never been great, diminished appreciably.

  The real problem of course was that the mix between the two was not very good, either personally or professionally. Bowles spoke in long, quasi-theological terms and the Kennedy people spoke in shorthand, almost a code, the fewer words the better, for tartness and brevity showed that you understood the code, were on the inside. Bowles spoke in terms of idealism, of world opinion, of political morality, wearing his high hopes for mankind right there on his sleeve, and the Kennedy people, if they thought that way—and some did and some did not—thought the worst thing you could do was confess openly to high idealism. Bowles, though wealthy, lacked the aristocratic style one might find at the dinner party of an Alsop or a Harriman, and at the Bowleses’ one was likely to find Indians, Africans, American Negroes and others; in an Administration which placed great emphasis on style and, ironically, would be remembered more for its style than its achievements, there was a feeling that Bowles had the wrong style; his wife, after all, was given to wearing Indian saris. All this was a problem, and so too was the fact that his basic view of the world, which had remained unchanged despite the pressures of the McCarthy years and the Cold War, had given him an image of being fuzzy and woolly-headed, and had made a convenient target for hard-liners in the press and in Congress. Part of this was Bowles’s own fault; he was marvelous at long-range thinking, at seeing the dangers inherent in policies, but he was a weak infighter. He lacked an ability to dissemble, he had no instinct for the jugular, he did not maneuver well at close hand. Thus, while Averell Harriman might stand for the same policy as Bowles, Harriman was not a good target; he was a vicious, almost joyous, brutal infighter, and anyone who tangled with him would do so in the full knowledge that Harriman would remember and strike back, and for a hard-line columnist like Joe Alsop, who had more than a little of a bully in him, Bowles made a much better target. His career in government thus was limited by the knowledge of potential adversaries that they could strike at him and he would not strike back.

  Actually there was precious little chance for Bowles, anyway, for it was one thing to use a liberal name to woo back the eggheads, but it was quite another to reassure the financial establishment, and the Democratic party was bitterly divided on questions of foreign policy, with two main chords running through it. One followed a harder line on foreign affairs, with a certain amount of cool acceptance of the New Deal issues. It was exemplified in foreign policy by the traditionalists like Dean Acheson, who had broken with Roosevelt in the New Deal over financial questions, whose entourage included the Alsop brothers as columnists and, to a degree, William Fulbright in the Senate. These men were committed to a view of manifest U.S. destiny in the world, where America replaced the British throughout the world as the guarantor of the existing order. It was a group linked to the Eastern establishment, that nebulous yet very real conglomerate of businessmen, lawyers and financiers who had largely been determining American foreign policy in this century. They believed that the great threat to the world was Communist, an enemy at once totalitarian, antidemocratic and antibusiness, that the Communists must be stopped and that the Communists understood only one thing, force. This group was above all realistic. It understood power; it was, in a favorite word of the era, hard-nosed. Some of its principal members had, for all their anti-Communism, been badly burned during the McCarthy years and they would never want to look soft again. The Cold War had not surprised them and they had rallied gladly to its banner. This wing had called for greater defense spending, and in the fifties and in general, the Democratic party espoused that cause, with only Hubert Humphrey of its congressional leaders speaking for disarmament. In fact, the Democratic party had been more committed to military spending than the Republicans. It was the Democrats who wanted a larger and larger defense establishment, and although Kennedy was not one of the great leaders at the time, he had been a part of it. (In 1960, at the start of the campaign, slightly worried about Kennedy’s lack of credentials in this area, a young Kennedy staff member named Deirdre Henderson had called one of the Defense intellectuals to summon his help on the problem. Kennedy, she said, needed a weapon. Everyone else had a weapon: Scoop Jackson had the Polaris, and Lyndon had Space, and Symington had the B-52. What could they get for a weapon for Kennedy? Well, said the young Defense intellectual, whose name was Daniel Ellsberg, “What about the infantryman?”)

  Former Secretary of State Acheson, the leader of this group, was uneasy with the Dulles years, not because of Dulles’ bombast, but because Acheson sensed weakness in Dulles. Acheson was afraid there was too little will to sacrifice, to spend for military might. In the late fifties, when the Democratic party’s Advisory Council met periodically to criticize the Eisenhower policies, some of the liberals like Kenneth Galbraith, Arthur Schlesinger and Bowles would later try and tone down the foreign policy statements, which they had come to refer to as “Acheson’s declarations of war.”

  The second wing of the party had its roots in the Roosevelt era, and its chief proponent was Eleanor Roosevelt. (The grande dame of the party had retained her suspicions of Jack Kennedy despite his attempts to convince her that he was committed to the same ideals. Shortly after his election he made one last journey to see her at Hyde Park and found her once again filled with suspicion. You don’t really trust me entirely, he said. No, that’s right, she answered. “What can I do to ease your suspicions?” he asked. “Make Adlai Secretary of State,” she answered. Later he left, shaking his head and smiling, impressed by her for the first time: “She’s really tough, isn’t she?”) During the fifties, this wing had found its principal spokesman in Stevenson, with his elegant prose, his self-deprecating wit. It felt that the United States must take more initiatives to end the arms race, that if America did not recognize Red China it should at least begin to move toward that goal, that nationalism was the new and most potent force in the underdeveloped world, that the United States must support it even at the expense of weakening ties with NATO allies, and finally that the greatest threat in the world might prove to be not Communism, but the combination of the arms race plus hunger and poverty in the Third World. To the Acheson group, the members of this wing, particularly Stevenson, seemed soft; they were do-gooders who did not understand power and force, who were too quick to believe in the UN. Adlai became a ready target—he was depicted as being too quick to talk and too slow to act; he was indecisive. In the great drawing rooms of Georgetown such as the Harrimans’, they would tell their Stevenson jokes (Stevenson about to give a speech and being told that he would go on in five minutes, asking an aide, “Do I have time to go to the bathroom?” Being assured that he did, then asking, “Do I want to go to the bathroom?”). The Stevenson group was seen as too committed to some vague idea of morality in world affairs and
too committed to the search for world opinion, willing to waste real relationships with solid European nations in return for vague promises from untrustworthy little wog nations that would probably vote against us in the UN, anyway.

  In this party division Kennedy had managed very well to straddle the factions. Since his own sense of style and presence was akin to the Stevenson group’s, he had attracted some of its members, having made speeches critical of French colonialism and French colonial wars, as well as the U.S. policy supporting the French. By the same token, in 1959 he had told Harris Wofford (knowing full well that this was exactly what moved Wofford) that the most important thing about the coming election was to change America’s foreign policy, to get away not just from the Dulles years but from the equally inflexible views of Acheson, which were so dominant within one section of the Democratic party; that we had to have new policies on China and on the underdeveloped world; and that we had to get away from the rigidity of the Cold War.

  Kennedy’s speeches on Algeria and French colonialism had angered Acheson and the French in approximately that order. Acheson subsequently wrote a book called Power and Diplomacy, which cited the Kennedy Algerian speech as a classic example of how not to make foreign policy, “this impatient snapping of our fingers.” This was not the way to treat our oldest ally, which was still smarting over the defeats of World War II and which bore an inferiority complex. Acheson was obviously angered that a United States senator should take the liberty of being critical of American foreign policy, no matter how, as in this case, dubious and ill-conceived it was; if nothing else, Acheson’s wrath was a reflection of how centrist that policy was, and how little real criticism was permitted. Some of the antipathy lingered on, with Acheson in 1960 telling a Washington luncheon club that Kennedy was an “unformed young man” (a comment ironically not particularly different from Mrs. Roosevelt’s), and with Acheson’s son-in-law William P. Bundy, who often reflected the Achesonian viewpoint, expressing his doubts about Kennedy’s toughness.

  If Kennedy was not exactly in the Acheson group, there was nonetheless an element of the hard-liner in him, as there was to almost everyone in politics at that point; at best he was cool and cautious and not about to rush ahead of events or the current political climate by calling for changes in the almost glacierlike quality of the Cold War. He was the epitome of the contemporary man in a cool, pragmatic age, more admiring of the old, shrewd, almost cynical Establishment breed (he was quite capable of telling John McCloy, another senior statesman of the Establishment, after trying to get him to take a high post, that the trouble was that the younger breed wasn’t as good, they lacked the guts and toughness of the McCloy generation) than of the ponderous do-good types like Bowles, who talked too much and might lose you countries (even in the business world Bowles’s success by Establishment lights was judged dubious; he had made millions, to be sure, but he had made them in advertising, which was not a serious profession, was in fact a noisy, splashy profession given to arousing people’s emotions rather than soothing them, a craft to be watched circumspectly). So if Kennedy straddled the two positions, it was not surprising—given the era, the Cold War still a major part of our life—that in January 1960 when he announced his candidacy for the Presidency his friend Joseph Alsop, the liberal hard-line columnist and journalistically a purveyor of the Acheson line, watched him and said enthusiastically to Earl Mazo, another reporter, “Isn’t he marvelous! A Stevenson with balls.”

  Chapter Three

  Kennedy had decided early on to be his own Secretary of State, a decision which was much applauded, since he was obviously well read (followers of newspapers and magazines were regularly apprised of what he and Jacqueline were reading that week, and when Jacqueline, meeting Ian Fleming, the British suspense writer, inquired if he was the Ian Fleming, the latter’s position as a major culture figure was assured, doubly so because it soon became apparent that the young President himself wanted to meet Fleming); he had served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee (largely thanks to Lyndon Johnson, who did not so much want to put Kennedy on the committee as he wanted to keep Estes Kefauver off, and needed someone with a party following in order to justify the exclusion of Kefauver); and he was, in Washington terms, considered conversant with the great problems of the world.

  This confidence in his ability had not always existed; indeed, Kennedy had not been a towering figure in Washington prior to his 1960 race, one main reason being that since 1956 he had almost never been there, always dashing out of town, meeting delegates, in preparation for the 1960 campaign. Lyndon Johnson was considered a more formidable force in Washington, in part because he was highly visible, a definitive man of Washington who reveled in the city, its intrigues, its power, whereas during much of the late fifties Jack Kennedy was a figure darting into the airport, sending an aide to the paperback-book counter to buy something for the trip, preferably history. There was a great Trevor-Roper phase in 1958, an aide remembered; one learned too little from fiction. But the 1960 campaign had changed his reputation in Washington. He had won the nomination, and had been given the chance to run for the Presidency, perhaps a more bully pulpit than the bully pulpit itself, Americans liking competitions as much as the end results of them.

  Sometime in the middle of the campaign he had hit his stride. Suddenly there was a new confidence in his speeches, even the timbre of his voice seemed to change. That harsh New England tone, which at first had jarred others, seemed to soften a little at the very same time that the nation began to find it distinctive and began to listen for it. He seemed to project a sense of destiny for himself and for his nation; he knew where he as a politician and we as a nation were going. Even Walter Lippmann sensed it, Lippmann, who more than any other man determined critical Washington’s taste buds. Lippmann influenced Reston, and Reston influenced the writing press and the television commentators, who influenced the television reporters. Lippmann began to hail this young man, who as no one since Franklin Roosevelt had caught and stirred and held the imagination of the American people. Day after day, columns in this vein appeared until finally, later in the campaign, the other venerable columnist, Arthur Krock, stomped out of his office, smoke belching from his cigar, saying, “Well, I may be getting old, and I may be getting senile, but at least I don’t fall in love with young boys like Walter Lippmann.” But Lippmann and the rest of the Washington community had watched the 1960 campaign and had approved; the feel, the texture of it was very good, and Richard Nixon had never been a particular favorite of critical Washington, to say the least. In Kennedy they had found a man worthy of the city, of the job, of the decade ahead. So when it became clear that he wanted to be his own Secretary of State, Washington did not dissent. This was a strong, well-educated, well-prepared young man. The idea was appealing: a strong President towering over his Secretary of State, whoever he might be. But to an extraordinary degree the very process of that choice would mark what the Administration was, and what many of its more basic attitudes and compromises were.

  Whoever else the Secretary was, it would not be Adlai Ewing Stevenson, a prophet with too much honor in his own party. Stevenson wanted the job, wanted it almost too much. He had played a historic role for his party, twice its presidential candidate, the first time running against impossible odds in 1952, at the height of the Korean War and McCarthyism, with the party already decaying from the scandals of twenty years in power. Running against the great hero of an era, Dwight Eisenhower, Stevenson had lost, of course, but his voice had seemed special in that moment, a voice of rationality and elegance. In the process of defeat he had helped salvage the party, giving it a new vitality and bringing to its fold a whole new generation of educated Americans, volunteers now in the political process, some very professional amateurs who would be masterly used by the Kennedys in 1960. If Jack and Robert Kennedy seemed to symbolize style in politics, much of that was derived directly from Stevenson. He had, at what should have been a particularly low point for the party, managed
to keep it vibrant and vital, and to involve a new kind of people in politics. The sense of Kennedy gratitude for these offerings was limited; the Kennedy brothers regarded him as indecisive and almost prissy, and somewhat disingenuous in the way that he seemed to like to portray himself being above politics and yet accepting the support of the Daley machine. It was all right, they thought, to present an image as the citizen-leader rather than the politician who made deals, but it was dangerous to believe it yourself. The Kennedys regarded him as weak and lacking in toughness, despite the fact that the races against great odds in 1952 and 1956 might historically be viewed as acts of courage (similarly, Kennedy would regard him as soft during the Cuban missile crisis, although Stevenson consistently stood alone against an enormous onslaught of the hard-line detractors). Stevenson, of course, had not named Jack Kennedy his running mate in 1956, but worse, he had opened the choice to the convention, which had made him seem indecisive.

  Yet for all this, there were many times in 1960 when he could have been chosen Secretary of State. There were overtures, made largely through Stevenson’s friends, letting him know that if he came aboard, State was his; the Kennedys still respected him, knew he had a powerful hold over many articulate elements in the party, and though the primaries were going well, the nomination was not locked up by a long shot. Stevenson seemed crucial. He might block them at Los Angeles, and the Kennedy people knew that Lyndon Johnson was counting on Stevenson to stay alive and stay open to the draft. Even as late as the day after the Oregon primary in May, the idea of State was still open, and Kennedy himself, visiting with Stevenson in Libertyville, Illinois, on his way back East from Portland, asked friends of Stevenson’s if he should make the offer right then and there. The aides said no, they thought it would offend the governor at that moment. The next day, when Stevenson was apprised of the offer, he seemed more reluctant than ever to join the team; the previous day’s meeting had not gone well. If the Kennedys thought him weak and indecisive, he in turn thought them arrogant and aggressive (“That young man,” he would tell friends of Jack Kennedy’s, “he never says please, he never says thank you, he never asks for things, he demands them”). Yet the offer stayed open through Los Angeles, though it closed there; the Kennedys found they could do without him, and his due bills evaporated overnight. As for Stevenson, though he desperately wanted to be Secretary of State, he could not make the deal, in part because he thought it wrong to barter an office of this import, but also because he still dreamed the impossible dream. He still wanted the Presidency himself and could not shed that haunting dream, which for several hours at Los Angeles threatened once more to come to life.